Snowdown, Intergalactic: Now, to me, this just reads as an invitation to get weird, like “spirit science” weird. Midwinter, North America – it’s either the perfect time to freeze our little tushes off, or, just perhaps, the exact perfect time to delve into alternate realities: fractals, chakras, crystals, torus flow energy. Depending on what your normal daily schedule involves, you may or may not ever find the time, between the meetings and feedings and predetermined, locked-in, buckled-down, inflexible, unchanging, never-ending repetition of wake/work/sleep (punctuated only by some shoveling, some scraping, some salting) in this white to dun to brown, back to white, rinse-repeat progression of Jack Frost’s quick, brisk days and long, frozen nights.
Spirit Science: Wut dis??? In order to properly prepare yourself, I invite you to change your pattern a bit in preparation for Durango’s hibernal throwdown. I don’t know what you do immediately before slumber, but for the next few nights, I recommend a few possible changes. First, run down to Ye Olde Weede Shoppe and grab an edible that can be easily divided (chocolate bars work well; actually, grab a couple. You’ll end up needing them by the end of all this. And grab a bit of a nice sativa while you’re at it). Next, about two hours before you want to be drifting off to Sandmanland, eat a hunk of the recommended dose and start loading up your googles with phrases like “Fibonacci Sequence,” “Flower of Life,” “pyramids around the world,” and “Mandelbrot set.” Maybe go a little crazy and try “Annanuki” while you’re at it. Oh, and throw on some early ’70s Floyd or some Sun Ra while this all goes on. As the THC from your plant ally takes hold and the images of hurricanes and sunflowers and spinning atoms start dancing across the backs of your eyelids, you’ll know that the veil which bounds the matrix of reg’lar ol’ 21st century American life is thin and there are ways to travel through it. Enjoy that thought as you drift away.
What is the point of my attempted inception, you ask? It is an invitation to shift the direction of your mind travels, as Snowdown taps into what I feel is a very important vein of human consciousness.
Snowdown, if nothing else, casually marks the midwinter point – December and January behind us, February and March yet to come. A cursory glance into any agrarian society should convince you that these marker celebrations are neither new nor insignificant to the psyche, and here in the Animas (Google the definition of that word, while you’re at it) Watershed, we are blessed, by virtue of Amendment 64 to be reunited legally with a friend of the human mind and spirit. Cannabis developed with us in the same primordial electrical soup that led to the fertile ooze and muck that led, eventually, to cities and smartphones and carpool schedules. It’s vital, this need to take the occasional sanity break, those steps outside our average life pattern that allow us to reconnect with that spark which resides at the core of each of us, the gift from the universe that helps us to remember our common unity. So take the opportunity this year during Snowdown to see where the edges of your mind have settled and to give them a nice stretch. Get high, look up into the sky, and let your animas take an intergalactic flight.
Christopher Gallagher lives with his wife and their four dogs and two horses. Life is pretty darn good. Contact him at [email protected].
